Virginia Mayo, James Cagney, White Heat
Virginia Mayo, an actress in a number of Technicolor productions of the 1940s and 1950s, died today at a nursing home in the Los Angeles suburb of Thousand Oaks. Mayo, who was 84, had been in poor health since contracting pneumonia a year ago.
Beginning her career as a chorus girl, the honey-blonde Virginia Mayo (born Virginia Clara Jones on Nov. 30, 1920, in St. Louis, Missouri) soon became one of the leading exponents of Technicolored female beauty during the post-World War II era. Never a great actress, she was always interesting to look at. And if her performances lacked warmth, Mayo exuded more than enough sultriness to compensate for that deficiency.
Initially a Samuel Goldwyn contract player, Mayo went from bit parts to leading lady roles within a year's time. Carefully photographed so her slight strabismus wouldn't show, Mayo was cast opposite fellow Goldwyn player Danny Kaye in four films, of which only the first was any good: the box-office hit Wonder Man (1945); The Kid from Brooklyn (1946); The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947); and A Song Is Born (1948), a musicalized (and inferior) remake of Howard Hawks' comedy Ball of Fire, with Mayo in the old Barbara Stanwyck role. (Additionally, Mayo had a bit part in Kaye's 1944 vehicle Up in Arms.)
Among her other Technicolored leading men of that era were Bob Hope in the so-so The Black Swan spoof The Princess and the Pirate (1944); and, during her stint at Warner Bros. (from the late '40s to the mid '50s), Burt Lancaster in the enjoyable costumer The Flame and the Arrow (1950); Gregory Peck in the stilted Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. (1951); Paul Newman in the risible The Silver Chalice (1954); and Rex Harrison and Laurence Harvey in the equally risible King Richard and the Crusaders (1954).
In most of those — and others such as Devil's Canyon (1953) and The Proud Ones (1956) — Mayo was little more than part of the decor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her two most memorable performances were in black-and-white: in William Wyler's Academy Award winner The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), as war veteran Dana Andrews' selfish wife who didn't want to waste the best years of her life on him; and Raoul Walsh's psychotic crime thriller White Heat (1949), as James Cagney's bitchy, cheating moll.
Among her other vehicles of the period that I haven't seen, yet, but that sound well worth checking out are three black-and-white crime thrillers: Roy Del Ruth's Red Light (1949), with George Raft; Richard L. Bare's Flaxy Martin (1949), in the title role, opposite Zachary Scott; and Vincent Sherman's Backfire (1950), with Gordon MacRae.
Mayo's film career slowed down dramatically with the demise of the studio system in the mid-to-late 1950s and the fact that she was pushing 40. From then on, she guested on television (Daktari, Night Gallery, Police Story), and made sporadic film appearances (the 1960s B Westerns Young Fury and Fort Utah, the minor horror flick The Haunted). Her last film role was in the grade-Z horror thriller The Man Next Door (1997).
Off screen, Virginia Mayo, who was married to actor Michael O'Shea from 1947 to his death in 1973, had the reputation of being a tough talker. Some time before Mayo's death, at a film convention in Los Angeles, Maureen O'Hara was on stage complaining that old-timers such as herself didn't see a penny (or very little money) from movies they had made decades earlier even though they still brought a good chunk of cash to the conglomerates that own the old movie studios' film libraries.
At that point, Virginia Mayo, sitting in the audience, yelled at her: "What? Don't you get a pension?"
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